Lancets are relatively small, hand-held medical cutting devices used for making incisions in patients such as, for example, in making incisions in the heels of infants to take blood samples. Hence, they are sometimes referred to as “heel sticks”. A number of prior art lancets have been proposed including for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,314,441; 5,951,582; 6,402,595 and 6,221,089 to list a few. However, all of the prior lancets have suffered from one or more problems such as, for example, producing non-ideally shaped incisions, causing more pain than desired, and being subject to variations in the incisions depending upon use by different medical personnel. In addition, they have been quite costly to produce, which is a serious problem since they are used only once and then disposed.
The object of the present invention is to eliminate, or substantially reduce, these and other problems of prior art lancets.